Essay On Night By Elie Wiesel

“ … The world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear - the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured, remained silent in the face of genocide.” - Elie Wiesel. The man behind that quote is one of the few people in the world to survive one of the worst tragedies in human history, The Holocaust. An event in which millions of people perished, all because of a crazed dictator’s dream. Elie Wiesel who amazingly survived the horrors, documented his experience in his book, Night. He has a very specific message in his book that many of us can learn from. Elie Wiesel wrote Night to show that the silence and hesitation surrounding the Holocaust is was what allowed it to occur and continue for as long as it did,

When Elie’s dad is close to death, an officer savagley beats him in front of Elie. “ I did not move, I was afraid.” he then feels guilty about his lack of action. Rather that helping, his father, he watches quietly as he is beaten when he struggles to hang on to life. Of course there would have definitley been a severe punishment for Elie or any other prisoner who spoke up against the guards but this happens so often in the camps that it becomes implied that this silent, resistant behavoir of the prisoners is what allows these types of punishments to occur everyday in the camps. The fear that Nazis created in the camps silenced the prisoners and made them vulnerable to everything they subjected them to. Since the Nazis were able to silence and destroy the soul of the prisoners they were able to continue to subject the Jews the torture of the Holocaust for such a long time. Elie Wiesel documents how the Nazis were able to create vulnerable prisoners and continue to process for a long time. They took away their voices, the only weapons that the Jews had